The Blood Mesa

sensation the previous evening. As Matt trailed behind him with an armload of tools Varley had asked him to bring, he said, 'Excuse me, Doctor, but are you sure this is a good place to dig?'

Varley stopped short and turned around to look at Matt with an irritated expression on his lined and weathered face. 'And exactly how many books on archeology have you written, Mr. Cahill?'

'You know I haven't written any,' Matt said.

And I've never even read any, but I know a bad place when I see it.

'Well, then, I think we'll leave those decisions up to me,' Varley said.

Matt nodded. 'Sure, Doctor.' What else could he say?

April and Scott assisted Dr. Varley, along with Sierra Hernandez and Chuck Pham. Hammond's excavation was a couple of hundred yards away. He had Brad Kern, Rich Rankin, Noel McAlister, and Maggie Flynn working there with him. Still farther away, almost on the other side of the settlement, Ronnie was excavating one of the collapsed kivas with the help of Jerry, Ginger, Astrid, and Stephanie Porter. Matt circulated among all three locations, fetching equipment and tools for the scientists and helping to haul away chunks of rock that were too big for one person to handle.

Hammond was as ugly as ever with the rotting sores on his face, but they didn't seem to be getting any worse, which surprised Matt a little because he had expected some progression. He kept a close eye on the others as well, in case sores began to pop up on their faces, but so far that hadn't happened. He didn't really like some of them, but he knew it was possible for people to be assholes without being truly evil.

Matt kept drifting back to Varley's excavation, convinced that if anything happened, it would be there. Varley had used stakes and twine to lay out a rectangle with a large rock at each corner. As Matt studied it, he realized how symmetrically the rocks were placed. They appeared to be markers designating an area about eight feet by fifteen feet.

When Matt stood there next to the excavation, he still felt the definite sense of unease that had cropped up inside him when he was here the night before. He wished he could talk Varley out of digging here, but every time he even broached the subject during the day, the elderly professor cut him off short.

About the middle of the afternoon, Ronnie scrambled out of the kiva, looked around, and then waved her arms at Matt, who was over by the truck. He had already spotted her as she emerged from the hole in the ground and recognized a sense of urgency in her movements. He started trotting toward her even before she signaled to him.

She motioned for him to stop and called, 'Round up everyone and bring them over here, Matt! We've found something they need to see!'

Matt couldn't tell from her attitude if the find was something good or bad, but Ronnie certainly seemed excited. He gave her a thumbs-up and headed for the other locations to spread the word.

'What's this all about?' Hammond asked irritably when Matt told him Ronnie wanted to see everybody at the kiva. 'Did she tell you what she'd found?'

Matt shook his head. 'Afraid not, Doctor. She just said everybody should go over there.'

'All right, all right,' Hammond muttered, adding to the students working with him, 'Come on.'

Everyone gathered around the kiva. The stone wall of the well-like structure was still partially intact, but it had collapsed in places and over the centuries allowed dirt to spill in and fill the hole. Ronnie and her helpers had dug down, exposing the broken top of the circular wall and emptying some of the dirt from the lower part of the kiva. Matt knew vaguely that the Indians had used these places in their religious ceremonies, but that was the extent of his knowledge.

Ronnie had gone back down the metal ladder that rested inside the hole. Ginger and Astrid were down there with her, but Jerry and Stephanie were on the ground outside the kiva with the others.

'What is it, Dr. Dupre?' Varley asked. 'A significant find?'

'I think so,' Ronnie said. She took something that Astrid handed her and came up the ladder to show it to the other members of the group. What looked like a dirty brown stick about a foot and a half long was really something else, Matt sensed as the unease grew inside him.

When Ronnie reached the top of the ladder, Hammond practically snatched the thing out of her hand.

'Good Lord,' he said. 'That's a human femur.'

'Look at the markings on it,' Ronnie said.

Everyone leaned in except Matt. He wouldn't have known what he was looking at.

He didn't have to wait long to find out, though. April made a face and asked, 'Are those . . . teeth marks?'

'I think so,' Ronnie said. 'It looks like something has gnawed all the meat off that bone.'

'Not something,' Hammond said with excitement in his voice. 'Someone. No wild animal did this. Those marks were made by human teeth.' A grin stretched across his rotting face. 'What you've found here, Dr. Dupre, is indisputable evidence of cannibalism!'

He didn't have to sound so damned happy about it, Matt thought.

Then again, considering that Hammond's face was rotting off his skull, maybe he did.

CHAPTER SEVEN

They were all excited by the discovery, even the ones like April, who were grossed out by it.

'We've uncovered several other bones with these markings,' Ronnie said. 'Also marks that look like they were made by flint knives or axes.'

'Excellent, excellent,' Varley said. 'Continue with your excavation, Dr. Dupre. Do you need some extra help with cleaning, identifying, and tagging the specimens?'

Ronnie shook her head. 'No, my team and I can handle it, at least for now. But I thought you'd all like to know.'

'Of course,' Hammond said as he handed the femur back to her. 'This is very exciting.'

They all stood around talking about it for a while; then Varley said, 'We should get back to work.'

The other teams returned to their digs, leaving Ronnie, Jerry, Ginger, Astrid, and Stephanie to work in and around the kiva. Jerry spread out a tarp on the ground and arranged all the bones they had found so far on it.

Matt watched him for a minute and then asked, 'Are you going to try to reassemble the whole skeleton?'

'No, not here,' Jerry said. 'That's a job that'll have to be done back at the university. Anyway, there may be more than one skeleton down there. We're still pretty high up in the kiva.'

Matt frowned. 'You mean there could have been a whole bunch of bodies in there?'

'Sure.' Jerry sound cheerful about the prospect, which Matt supposed meant that he was a true scientist. The evidence left behind was more important than all the people who had died to provide it.

'The Indians normally didn't use these kivas as burial pits, did they?'

'We don't really know everything they were used for,' Jerry said. 'The later Puebloan tribes used them primarily for ceremonial purposes, but the Anasazi and the other early peoples in this region had them, too, and we don't know why. I don't recall reading about anybody ever coming across evidence of them being used as burial pits . . . until now. And what happened here wasn't exactly a burial, you know.'

Matt frowned. 'What do you mean?'

'Well . . . you heard what Dr. Dupre said about all the meat being gnawed off the bone. When you finish with a chicken wing, what do you do with the bone?'

'Throw it in the garbage,' Matt said as a hollow feeling crept into his gut. 'This was a garbage dump for cannibals.'

'Looks like it might've been,' Jerry said.

'Jerry,' Astrid called from down in the excavation. 'We've got more bones here!'

'Coming,' Jerry said.

Matt felt a little sick and just wanted to get away from there. Ancient cannibal Indians . . . just one more indication, as if he or anybody else needed it, that human evil wasn't a recent invention.

By the end of the day, the tarp Jerry had spread on the ground was covered with human bones, and another